8 Questions every founder must ask oneself:

If you are a founder of a start-up or a fairly established tech company, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Are you satisfied with the speed at which the features and functionality is rolled out in production and in the hands of your customers / prospects?
2. Do you believe that you have selected the right tech stack to support your customer base now and in next 2-5 years?
3. Is your team able to make changes to the apps and deploy them frequently?
4. Are you happy with the quality of User Experience (UX), design, performance and quality of code?
5. Do you think with the number of changes and the evolution your app code is easily maintainable?
6. Do you think with the apps you have today are in line with what you envisaged in the beginning?
7. Do you think the security measures taken are adequate and minimize the risks of your business coming to stand-still?
...and most importantly,
8. How fast do you realize that the path you undertook needs a fundamental change? Will such a change break you instead of making you? How can your tech partner salvage and reuse or minimize the cost of rework and allow you a lease of life to fulfill your vision?

Founders spreading too thin resulting in lack of focus on Business!: As founders of tech companies, we have faced these challenges in the past and have realized how painful it is to deal with the situation, when you are completely torn between trying to build business around innovative idea(s), winning customers, building the team, organizing infrastructure, managing cash flows and raise funding on one hand and on the other, developing and managing your product and continuously evolve it. In trying to juggle on these fronts simultaneously, innovation and quality invariably take the beating. You can imagine the stresses that the founders are subjected to, only when you experience it. We will never forget the sleepless nights we had spent on trying to walk the tightrope. The key here is to carry out a quick health check of your products and the tech stack. With many years of experience knowing exactly what works and what does not,  D10X experts can quickly pin-point the risks and will provide you the mitigation steps.

Ability to re-invent quickly: The process of startup success is not mostly and simply just incremental changes on what you build initially and embark on a journey. At some point (in most cases, many times), there is a realization that going back to drawing board is essential. An absolute new road needs to be undertaken from the core application or product perspective.

After speaking to a lot of founders, we realized, the above two aspects are primarily responsible why 95% of the tech start-ups fail. Hence the key question we contemplated on is, what can make the life of the founder little easier and dramatically improve the chances of success of the venture? This gave birth to Discovery10X (D10X)! – the company driven by the purpose of helping the start-up founders manage their tech solutions, bringing their ideas to reality in the quickest and ‘Agile’ way – implemented most sensibly.

The key principal here is to fail fast, so you can improve on it quickly. The cost of fixing any bug goes up exponentially as it lives longer in the system.

It is therefore time that you reflect on these 8 questions. If you are uncertain about any of the above, do not wait any longer, because who knows? you could be sitting on a time bomb!

So how do we address the risks?

As part of our Technical Due Diligence service, we audit the following areas (and more):

So don’t let your venture fall in the 95%. Act today, sign-up for a Tech Evaluation by D10X and ensure your product and the venture has a bright tomorrow!

contact us at contactme@d10x.io

Anand Joshi

Co-founder